Read Damage Control (Valiant Knox) for Free Online

been trying to tell him, that she’d been assigned to his damn training program?
    He had to go into extreme damage control, right now . Destroy whatever small connection they’d forged in the medbay. Make her hate him like all the other recruits. His chest contracted around his organs. That was all he needed, to have a coronary from the stress of the crap he’d walked himself into.
    He took a step back from her. “I asked you a question, Recruit Wolfe.”
    She swallowed, and he wondered if her throat was still raw. His own felt stripped dry and he’d only been breathing that smoke for a few moments.
    “Sir, Sub-Doctor Moore released me. I feel fine, sir.” Her gaze flicked away to focus somewhere over his shoulder.
    “And what orders did the sub-doctor release you with, Wolfe?”
    Her lips pressed into a thin line, and for a moment, he thought she wasn’t going to answer.
    “Sir, to rest for at least twenty-four hours and use the breather every two of that, sir.”
    He’d suspected as much. “Do you call this resting, Wolfe? And how long ago did you last use the breather?”
    “Sir, I used the breather one hour and twenty-five minutes ago, sir.”
    And she so conveniently didn’t answer his question about resting. He checked over her uniform, finding her neat except for the glint of a gold chain under her tags.
    “We don’t need any heroes in our ranks, Wolfe. We need dependable pilots. Take that gold chain off. You’re dismissed until tomorrow. Follow the doctor’s instructions, or you’ll find yourself demoted to the front lines on Ilari before evening messdeck.”
    After what he’d done, he’d take any excuse he could get to see her wash out before the mistake he’d made turned into a full-blown catastrophe. However, he couldn’t conscionably sabotage her on purpose and still call himself a decent CO. Still, he could sure as hell hope she didn’t get through the first day or two.
    Her expression tensed, but she saluted him and turned, picking up her rucksack and disappearing across the deck. Leigh shook his head. That one had complication written all over her, the likes of which he didn’t want to know about.
    He turned his attention to the next recruit in line to finish tidying up his sorry bunch of wannabe fighter pilots. Once he had the recruits looking closer to respectable, he stepped back into formation next to the other instructors and gave a run down of how things would play out. His crew took turns introducing themselves and then each recruit got handed a map of the Valiant Knox .
    The Knox was one of the UEF’s bigger battleships, with a few thousand military and civilian staff living and working on board at any given time. The ship even had a commerce level that acted as a trade center when the ship wasn’t stationed in a war zone. For now, the level simply provided entertainment and places to socialize—like bars and restaurants—for the crew. There were several levels of crew housing apartments, a couple of dedicated levels such as the command center and the fighter-pilot-squadron level, and any number of other amenities and storage. The Knox was like a huge space-bound city or military base, with everything necessary to cope with long deployments.
    But there would be no guided tour for these young soldiers. They learned the layout fast on their own or it was just one more way they could wash out. After all, if they couldn’t navigate a battleship, how the heck did they think they’d be able to fly a fighter jet through space?
    The recruits were dismissed and he caught more than a few looks of relief. He shook his head. They thought introduction-parade day one was hard? Wait until training commenced.
    Leigh turned to Bren, Seb, and Lawler, who’d started discussing their initial impressions, none of which were glowing.
    Across the hangar deck, where the recruits milled waiting for the Ilari shuttle, he caught a flash of shining gold hair. Couldn’t be . Not after his specific